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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T02:32:54+00:00

This is a sed and RegEx beginner question, but I was not able to

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This is a sed and RegEx beginner question, but I was not able to answer it myself through googling.

Szenario

I have got a plain text file like this as the log file of a command:

Checking version of 'make' >= 379... succeeded. (382)
Checking version of 'm4' >= 104... succeeded. (104)
Checking version of 'pkg-config' >= 15... succeeded. (25)
Checking version of 'autoreconf' >= 258... succeeded. (268)
Checking version of 'automake' >= 108... ./_autosetup: line 28: type: automake: not found

Desired Outcome

I would like to extract all words within the single quotes, which occur in combination with not found at the end of line.

What I Did and the Problem

Thus, I first grep for not found and pipe the result to sed: (I am using the line of the not found later, thus -n with grep)

grep -n "not found" < textfile.log | sed -n 's/.*\(\'.*\'\).*/\1/p'

With this I am getting two errors: First, that it reached end of file while searching ' and second, that the end of file was unexpected.

I also tried

grep -n "not found" < textfile.log | sed -n 's/.*[\']\(.*\)[\'].*/\1/p'

to only get the word within the single quotes without the quotes. Only getting the same errors.

Thanks for your help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use that line instead:

    grep -n "not found" < textfile.log | sed -n "s/.*\('.*'\).*/\1/p"

    You can use double quotes to quote ' inside the pattern (so you don’t have to backquote them.) That expression also includes the quotes. Without the quotes themselves would require using the parentheses inside the quotes:

    grep -n "not found" < textfile.log | sed -n "s/.*'\(.*\)'.*/\1/p"

    But I guess you already know that.

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